“You talk as if you knew I came from the university, and it is true. I am from there. I’m a kind of research student in culture. I’m a junior research fellow in African culture. Our culture…sorry I mean our culture. That is what I call English cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism is mother to the slavery of the mind and body. It is cultural imperialism that gives birth to the mental blindness and deafness that persuades people to allow foreigners to tell them what to do in their own country, to make foreigners the ears and mouths of their national affairs, forgetting the saying: Only he who lives in the wilderness knows what it is like. Hence a foreigner can never become the true guide of another people. It is about our generation that the singer sang:
The deaf man, the deaf man
The deaf man is he who can’t hear for the nation!
The blind man, the blind man,
The blind man is he who can’t see for the nation!
Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, “Devil on the Cross”, 1982
Photo R. Kennedy Stephen
